Well, since Lance's post below is what we've been doing for the last week, I thought I'd at least explain a little more. When we got down here we realized that his current motorcycle was not reliable and a second vehicle was almost a necessity. I'm not a fan of Lance riding motorcycles but according to our finances we can afford a bike for Lance or nothing at all. Of course Lance came up with every possible argument and angle for getting a bike so I finally gave in with a few (ok, many) conditions. First and foremost I had a lot of rules about where, when and how he could ride. Then I told him that he had to show me his financial plan for repaying our savings. He actually came up with a decent plan, mostly involving me waiting to get a new computer. Somehow he always gets his toys first, I must love him or something.
Anyways, we finally set a budget for buying his motorcycle and Lance started looking. He found one at a shop but it was a little over our price. We reasoned that since it included all the DMV fees it might not be too bad. The only problem was the bike was in a different branch of the shop that was a few hours away. Well the shop originally said they would drive it down for us to look at but after a few days they changed their minds. Lance was a little sad. Then the shop said they'd sell a different bike to him for the same price. Lance looked at it and loved it, but the shop said they couldn't sell it for that cheap and wanted more than $1000 over our budget for it. Lance let it go but again, he was sad. Poor Lance. So Lance turned once again to private sellers on craigslist. He found a beautiful bike an hour away and called. The seller had someone coming to look at it but gave Lance all the information on the bike. Lance was very excited since the bike was the exact style he'd been looking for. Later that evening Lance called to ask a few more questions and the seller told him that the bike was being taken in the morning. Lance was having a very disappointing week.
The next morning the seller called Lance back and said the bike was still available thanks to a flaky buyer. Lance had a short day at work which let us drive up to look at the bike. However we had one large problem. Our main bank account has no bank branches in this state to withdraw money. After a few calls to the bank they decided the best way for us to access our money was to raise our daily atm limit temporarily and to pull it all out of an atm. Since atm's have a transaction limit, it took us 10 transactions to pull out $3000 in twenty dollar bills. That's 150 twenties. Lance said he felt like a drug dealer. We took it into a bank to change into something more reasonable. Then it was on to look at the bike. We even stopped at Uncle Lonnie's house to visit for a few minutes.
The second Lance saw the bike I knew we were going to buy it. It was in our price range and looked beautiful! Plus the seller was very nice, threw in some extra accessories and best of all he wanted to do the transaction in a bank and notarize everything. I like working with legitimate people. Since the banks were closed for the evening we arranged to meet on Saturday. The seller drove the bike down, we conducted business at the bank and then Lance spent 4.5 hours shining the chrome on his new toy. We need to finish getting the bike set up with the DMV this week but Lance should be ready to ride for this weekend. Just not far. Because that's one of my conditions.
